Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Distyl AI • San Francisco, CA

2d • $150,000 - $250,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Forward Deployed AI Engineers build and operate production AI systems that deliver business value inside customer environments. This role is for engineers who thrive in ambiguous problem spaces, take ownership of outcomes, and want to work directly on AI systems that must perform reliably under enterprise constraints.
Forward Deployed AI Engineers are hands-on builders. They design, implement, deploy, and iterate on end-to-end AI systems in close partnership with customers, subject matter experts, and other Distyl engineers. They translate messy operational needs into concrete system behavior, build the software and AI workflows required to support that behavior, and continuously improve systems through evaluation, feedback, integration, and production iteration.
This is not a demo-building role. Forward Deployed AI Engineers are expected to make AI systems work in practice: with users, data, constraints, and accountability for production outcomes.

Requirements

• 2+ years of software engineering experience
• Ownership mentality for AI systems. You take responsibility for whether the systems you build deliver their intended value in production. You are comfortable making technical decisions, learning from system behavior, and owning the results of your work
• Experience building AI systems. You have built applications powered by LLMs or other AI models and are comfortable composing multiple components — prompts, agents, tools, retrieval, evaluators, workflows, and integrations — into end-to-end systems. You reason about system behavior holistically rather than treating models as black boxes
• Strong engineering fundamentals. You write clean, maintainable Python and are comfortable building production software systems. You understand core engineering concepts like versioning, debugging, testing, performance, code review, and production readiness
• AI-native working style. You use AI tools daily to write and debug code, explore designs, analyze data, and automate repetitive work. You are curious about new model capabilities and techniques, and actively incorporate them into how you build and iterate on systems
• Comfort in customer environments. You are able to work directly with customer teams, ask good questions, and adapt quickly to new domains. You communicate clearly about system behavior, limitations, and tradeoffs, and can operate effectively in high-trust, high-visibility situations
• Pragmatic delivery mindset. You can navigate ambiguity, make progress with incomplete information, and balance speed with robustness when building systems that need to work for production users

Nice To Haves

• Willingness to travel. Travel is typically 10–30%, depending on the project, customer needs, and your role on the engagement

Responsibilities

• Build and operate AI systems deployed in customer environments, taking ownership of system behavior, reliability, and usefulness in production
• Design and implement compound AI workflows that combine models, prompts, agents, tools, retrieval, evaluation, feedback loops, and execution into coherent production systems aligned with user and SME needs
• Develop clean, maintainable Python services and application logic that integrate AI capabilities into customer workflows, data platforms, APIs, and existing applications
• Operate on live systems by measuring behavior, identifying failure modes, debugging issues, and iterating rapidly to improve quality, reliability, and user value
• Build evaluation frameworks, test cases, feedback mechanisms, and observability patterns that help teams understand and improve AI system performance over time
• Work directly with customer stakeholders and subject matter experts to understand workflows, clarify requirements, reason about tradeoffs, and adapt systems as needs evolve
• Use AI-native engineering tools to accelerate implementation, debugging, experimentation, data analysis, and system improvement
• Collaborate with other AI Engineers, AI Strategists, and other Distillers to make pragmatic system design decisions that balance speed, robustness, maintainability, and customer impact
• Take accountability for the production outcomes of the components, workflows, and systems you build

Benefits

• 100% covered medical, dental, and vision for employees and dependents
• 401(k) with additional perks (e.g., commuter benefits, in‑office lunch)
• Access to state‑of‑the‑art models, generous usage of modern AI tools, and real‑world business problems
• Ownership of high‑impact projects across top enterprises
• A mission‑driven, fast‑moving culture that prizes curiosity, pragmatism, and excellence

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed